Re: [PATCH bpf-next 1/7] bpf: use common jump (instruction) history across all states

Eduard Zingerman
2023-11-09T15:20:15Z

On Mon, 2023-10-30 at 22:03 -0700, Andrii Nakryiko wrote:
> Instead of allocating and copying jump history each time we enqueue
> child verifier state, switch to a model where we use one common
> dynamically sized array of instruction jumps across all states.
>
> The key observation for proving this is correct is that jmp_history is
> only relevant while state is active, which means it either is a current
> state (and thus we are actively modifying jump history and no other
> state can interfere with us) or we are checkpointed state with some
> children still active (either enqueued or being current).
>
> In the latter case our portion of jump history is finalized and won't
> change or grow, so as long as we keep it immutable until the state is
> finalized, we are good.
>
> Now, when state is finalized and is put into state hash for potentially
> future pruning lookups, jump history is not used anymore. This is
> because jump history is only used by precision marking logic, and we
> never modify precision markings for finalized states.
>
> So, instead of each state having its own small jump history, we keep
> a global dynamically-sized jump history, where each state in current DFS
> path from root to active state remembers its portion of jump history.
> Current state can append to this history, but cannot modify any of its
> parent histories.
>
> Because the jmp_history array can be grown through realloc, states don't
> keep pointers, they instead maintain two indexes [start, end) into
> global jump history array. End is exclusive index, so start == end means
> there is no relevant jump history.
>
> This should eliminate a lot of allocations and minimize overall memory
> usage (but I haven't benchmarked on real hardware, and QEMU benchmarking
> is too noisy).
>
> Also, in the next patch we'll extend jump history to maintain additional
> markings for some instructions even if there was no jump, so in
> preparation for that call this thing a more generic "instruction history".
>
> Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@kernel.org>

Nitpick: could you please add a comment somewhere in the code
(is_state_visited? pop_stack?) saying something like this:

states in the env->head happen to be sorted by insn_hist_end in
descending order, so popping next state for verification poses no
risk of overwriting history relevant for states remaining in
env->head.

Side note: this change would make it harder to change states traversal
order to something other than DFS, should we chose to do so.

Acked-by: Eduard Zingerman <eddyz87@gmail.com> …